Every year, toward the end of November, Betty Masterman had been accustomed to receive an invitation to spend Christmas at Clyst Fullerford. This year, to her surprise, she received a long, carefully-worded letter in Mollie's childish handwriting: a letter which contained the unusual suggestion that Mollie should spend Christmas with her. "My dear," wrote the girl, "I simply daren't ask you down here. It's too utterly dull for words."

Betty, nothing if not extravagant, wired back an immediate answer; and met her friend, two days before Christmas eve, in the holiday bustle at Waterloo station.

"Mollie," greeted the grass-widow, "you look like a ghost. What on earth's happened to you since the summer?"

But it was not until Betty's "daily woman" had completed her hasty washing up of the dinner things, and they sat alone in front of the gas-fire in the little red-papered sitting-room, that Mollie answered the question.

"Betty dear," she said, puffing a vague cigarette. "I'm feeling too rotten for words. Nothing seems to go right with me these days."

Betty's experienced eyes sparkled with laughter. "Give sorrow words," she quoted chaffingly; and then, a note of seriousness in her voice, "What's the trouble? The sister or the Wilberforce man?"

"You've heard something then?"

"Only gossip." The other trod carefully. "But of course I'm not quite a fool. I thought when you came rushing round here from Lancaster Gate that something must have gone pretty wrong."

"Everything's gone wrong." Mollie repeated the inevitable slogan, of post-war youth, "Everything. You remember Ronald Cavendish----"

"I've met him once or twice."

"Well, Alie's run away from Hector----"

"And run away to Cavendish."

"You did know then?"

"My dear, everybody knows." Betty considered the position. "Still, that's their affair, isn't it? Why should you worry about it? There'll be a divorce, I suppose, and after that they'll get married."

"That's just the trouble."

"How do you mean?"

"Apparently, Hector's refused to divorce Alie."

"Oh!"

The pair inspected one another across the mellow firelight. After a long pause, the elder said:

"You're not much of a pal, Mollie. You've only told me half the story."

Mollie Fullerford blushed. Her reticent virginity revolted from the idea of confessing herself, to Betty, in love with James Wilberforce. Yet that she was in love with the man, most uncomfortably in love with him, Mollie knew. Despite all her efforts to maintain the pose of the modern young, the pose of cold-blooded mate-selection, she had failed as lamentably as most others of her kind to control nature. Nature and the modern creed refused to be reconciled. She realized now that she wanted--exclusively--James. She wanted to belong to him; she wanted him to belong to her; she wanted him--and no other--to father her children.

That last thought rekindled Mollie's blushes. Succeed as she might in curbing her tongue, she could not curb her feelings. She fell to wondering if Jimmy would ask her to marry him, to speculating whether, even if their friendship so abruptly broken off should be renewed (as she had subconsciously hoped it would be renewed when she invited herself to London), whether, even if Jimmy did ask her to marry him, she would be capable of sacrificing Aliette. Would she not be forced to make conditions--conditions that no man in Jimmy's position could possibly accept? Would she not be forced to say: "If I marry you, you'll have to let me receive my sister and my sister's lover"?

"How about the Wilberforce man?" Betty's words interrupted reverie. "Does he know you're in town?"

"Yes," admitted Mollie.

"You still write to each other then?"

"Only occasionally."

"My dear, how exciting! When did you hear from him last?"

But at that Aliette's sister broke off the conversation with a wry "Betty, I simply won't be cross-examined."

"You needn't get ratty, dear thing," retorted the grass-widow. "I don't want to pry into your secrets. But"--she rustled up from her chair, and made a movement to begin undressing--"if he should write that he's coming to see you, for goodness' sake try and make yourself look a little less of a 'patient Griselda.' What about face-massage? I know a man in Sloane Street who's simply wonderful!"